Real wild child joan jett5/18/2023 After convincing her parents to buy her a guitar at age 13, the gangly brunette became a fixture at Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco in LA, where she worshipped at the wild altar of glam-rockers like Gary Glitter, T.Rex and Suzi Quatro. Jett’s early years certainly contained a hefty dose of all three. What makes it a good story for the big screen? Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.” “What drew me to the story,” says Sigismondi, “is the fact that Cherie and Joan were doing things that girls weren’t allowed to do, and the rebel in me was attracted to that. Jett executive-produced the movie, which stars Stewart - who told reporters, “Whenever I wasn’t coming from the right place, was always like, ‘Kristen! P – – – y to the wood! F – – – the guitar!’” - and an almost-all-grown-up Fanning as Jett’s bandmate, Cherie Currie. The first - the biggie - is “The Runaways,” a modestly budgeted movie from director Floria Sigismondi about the pioneering all-girl punk band Jett formed in 1975 when she was just a teen. I’ve toured every year since 1975, and I’ve been lucky enough that people still want to come to our shows.”Ī spate of pop cultural offerings due out this week is likely to give Jett’s bottom line a boost, whether or not she ever decides to take a break from the constant touring. Obviously you can’t pay your rent with it, but that’s why I’m always out on the road. “The profit is when kids come up to me and say, ‘You inspired me to pick up a guitar.’ Or ‘I was having a really tough time and your music helped me through it’. “I’m not looking for a huge profit that’s not the motive,” explains the longtime New Yorker, who sounds as if she’s just made her way through a carton of menthols when she calls from a hotel room in Los Angeles, where she’s preparing for the movie’s big premiere. So where does that leave Jett? Well, somewhere on the fringes of the classic-rock mainstream, and it turns out that suits her just fine. Still, while you can probably recite most of the lyrics to Jett’s biggest songs by heart - her cover of the Arrows’ “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” and her own “Bad Reputation,” for starters - that may well be where your knowledge of the performer begins and ends. There’s the perennially slick bad-girl style (think Betty Rubble by way of David Bowie) the unwaveringly outspoken feminist views and, most importantly, a three-decades-strong fixation on rock ’n’ roll despite the financial drubbing the genre’s suffered at the hands of mainstream pop. The movie’s producers must be relieved - the spiky-haired, tat-sporting singer isn’t the kind of person you’d want to cross when making a movie based on her life story: Jett’s career, and almost eerily unchanging persona, could well be a model for what’s known in the popular vernacular as sticking to one’s guns. She ends conversations with a gruff, but gentle, “Have a nice day, man.” Recent weeks have found her coming to the defense of tween phenom Kristen Stewart (who plays and covers songs by Jett in the new musical biopic “The Runaways”) and washing dogs for charity. When asked about the quiet life she splits between the West Village and a waterfront home in Long Beach, Long Island, she pauses for a moment before responding: “I don’t know if I get recognized necessarily, though I do get looked at a lot - but I don’t know if it’s because of who I am, or if people just think I look weird.” Given the fact that she’s one of mainstream music’s most infamous bad girls, veteran rocker Joan Jett is surprisingly, well, sweet.
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